Making neo-nationalist subject in Japan: The intersection of nationalism,jingoism,and populism in the digital age

Abstract

This article considers how digital media communication reconfigures a “neo-nationalist subject” in the Japanese context. A neo-nationalist subject is not the so-called modern national subject that maintains a shared, collective identity as the rationale regulating his or her decisions and behavior, but rather is a fragmented subject that, in view of “the decline of symbolic efficiency,” is open to discourses that others are in effect stealing his or her “enjoyment” (jouissance). Starting from an overview of the rise of cyber-nationalism and the popularity of neoliberal authoritarian governance in Japan since the 1990s, we explore how affect-driven digital media environments promoted by a neoliberal economy produce neo-nationalist subjects who attribute responsibility for their dissatisfaction with life to others, and whose self-defensive “drive” functions as the primary support of the culture of hate and modern racism. In this way, we offer an account for the intersection of nationalism, jingoism, and populism in the digital age.

Since the 1990s, Japanese society has been faced with a renewed rise of nationalist discourse and activities that express revisionist, jingoistic, and racist views. These discourses and activities are driven through digital media network communications, and the main participants in this “cyber-nationalism” are called cyber right-wingers (netto uyoku). The rise of the cyber-nationalism seems to have much to do with the political environment in Japan, in which Japanese conservative or right-wing politicians have tried to gain popularity from the people by appealing to their nationalistic sentiments, including the justification of Japan’s colonialism in Asia, which has attracted severe criticisms from South Korea and China. In addition, there has been increasing criticism of the nationalist discourse and activities in Japan that have grasped cyber-nationalism in Japan as a variant of nationalism based on the narrative of a modern nation-state. However, in terms of the formation of subjectivity, cyber-nationalism is different from such modern or traditional nationalism. While the modern national subject is assumed to hold a consistent identity based on a totalized symbolic order, a cyber-driven neo-nationalist subject is more fragmented, self-concerned, and inconsistent and is subject to the affect elicited by digital media communication. Through an overview of the rise of cyber-nationalism in Japan since 1990s, this study considers how populist governance by conservative nationalist politicians has correlated with a culture of hate and modern racism in Japan. The study then elucidates how affect-driven digital media environments produce neo-nationalist subjects whose “drive” is the key element of their jingoism and racism.

The context of the emergence of the nationalist discourse in the 1990s and 2000s

Following the collapse of the bubble economy, Japan suffered a long recession in the early 1990s, while various anxieties related to politico-economic instability and social contradiction or disintegration prevailed in Japanese society. In addition, Japanese people were traumatized by enormous shocks such as the Kobe earthquake and the nerve-gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by the religious cult group, Aum Shinrikyō. Even after the 1990s, Japan could not recover from those crises, while the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 had a catastrophic impact on Japanese society and worsened its political and socioeconomic situation. Indeed, the two decades following the 1990s are called “the two decades of loss” (ushinawareta nijūnen). Against the backdrop of these critical conditions, numerous kinds of nationalistic discourses, actions, and movements have been generated in attempts to compensate symbolically for the great losses through a reappreciation of Japan’s achievements.

Among those nationalistic trends, the earliest and most salient or notorious was the rise of a movement whose purpose was to publish new history textbooks for junior high school and thereby to oppose the “self-tormenting” view of Japan’s history (jigyaku-shikan), particularly the conduct of the Japanese Empire in the Asian region, which had been criticized as imperialistic and colonialist. A group named “Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform” (Atarashii-rekishi-kyōkasho wo tsukuru-kai), which was organized in 1996, and whose members were university scholars and popular intellectuals, was the main actor in this movement. It argued that, because Japan’s modern history had been distorted by leftist intellectuals and mass media, influenced by their discourses over many years since the defeat in the war, it was necessary to abandon the distorted view and to regain Japan’s national pride, like other “normal” countries (futsuu-no-kuni). The arguments raised by the group were strongly related to the problem of the “memory wars” between Japan, China, and Korea, in which the responsibilities for Japan’s wartime policies and conduct, including the “comfort woman” (jūgun ianfu), Nanjing massacre, and Yasukuni shrine, were sharply highlighted and strongly criticized (see Morris-Suzuki, 2005).

Thus, in Kobayashi 1998, Yoshinori, a famous cartoonist and an axial member of the group, published a comic book titled Senso-rōn (On war) as a special volume of his political commentary comic series, Gōmanizumu-sengen (The arrogancism manifesto). The idea of the book was to glorify the patriotism of grandfathers who served in the war as the kernel of the national narrative, thus denying the historical facts of Japanese imperialism and colonialism over the Asian region, and emphasizing modern Japan’s sublime mission and ideal of delivering the Asian populace from Western imperialism and racism. The attempts by Kobayashi and the group to appreciate wartime and prewar Japan should be understood as a revisionist approach to fabricate the value of the Japanese national identity. This approach successfully appealed to the people, who had begun to lose their confidence as Japanese, causing them to misconstrue this loss as due to something other than the leftists and mass media. Here, it could be argued that Kobayashi and the group invented a way to turn people into nationalist subjects, identifying the collective memory of the “great” war waged by Japan as the core of the ideology.

Meanwhile, the 1990s was also a period in which the critique of the nation-state (kokumin-kokka-ron) reached its peak. The concept of the nation-state and nationalism had been regarded as the rationale that underpinned democratization in the postwar era. For example, as puts it Kang(2001, p. 135), the representative postwar intellectual, Maruyama Masao, thought that “open nationalism” (hirakareta-nashonarizumu) was necessary for individuals to become free and independent subjects who could decide by themselves to build a democratic nation-state. For Maruyama, nationalism should have been the key principle that oriented an individual subject not to the self-interests of “I” but to the publicness of “us,” which tends to lead to the conception of a nation in an essentialist manner. This kind of consciousness of nation and nationalism pervaded through even the left and liberal camps (Oguma, 2002, p. 826), while the posture of persisting with the postwar constitution’s ideal of pacifism could also be rooted in a nationalist sentiment. In other words, although the left and liberal camps criticized the right or conservative nationalists who were sympathetic to wartime Japan, they did not reject the significance of nationalism and nation itself. However, in the early 1990s, a fundamental criticism of nationalism and the nation-state emerged, with an enormous impact on the discourse on nationalism.

A prominent critique of the nation-state came from Nishikawa Nagao, who published a book titled Kokkyō no koekata: hikaku-bunnka-ron josetsu (The way to cross the border: An introduction to the study of comparative culture) in 1992. He argued that nationalism was an ideology of the nation-state to divide nations into “we” and “they” and to legitimatize discrimination and racism according to the division within and across the nations (Nishikawa, 2001, p. 18). Arguing that the publicness of nationalism as an assumed principal positive element was limited, he emphasized that the nation-state tried to mobilize people to become national subjects through nationalism. In other words, an individual is made to become a national subject as if they decide by themselves to become the subject. Besides Nishikawa’s arguments, numerous crucial works that contributed to the development of the critique of the nation-state were published in the 1990s. For example, the Japanese translation of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Community was republished as the expanded edition in 1997; Yamanouchi Yasushi’s study on total war regime (sōryoku-sen-taisei) was published as his edited volume, titled Sōryoku-sen to gendai-ka (Total war and modernisation), in 1995; Ueno Chizuko published Nashonarizumu to jendā (Nationalism and gender), in 1998, as a critique of the nationalist subject from the perspective of gender studies, while the approach of cultural studies and postcolonial studies began to be introduced into Japan in the late 1990s. As may be imagined, the commentators from this anti-nationalist camp thoroughly criticized the pro-nationalist camps such as the textbook revisionist group: For example, Takahashi Tetsuya and Komori Yoichi published Nashonaru hisutorī wo koete (Beyond the national history) in 1998. Thus, the 1990s was a period when the opposite poles of the spectrum of the dispute on nationalism and nation stood out, while the momentum of the two poles was amplified through the interplay between them.

As Kobayashi and the members of the textbook group succeeded to develop a new market for pro-nationalists, younger generations were attracted by their historical perspective. It is often pointed out (Kurahashi, 2019, pp. 110–111) that the pro-nationalist, rightist discourse constructed by Kobayashi and the textbook group members prepared the rise of cyber right-wingers (netto uyoku). The internet forum, Ni-channeru (2 channel), was established in 1999, and became popular among young people who wanted to exchange their revisionist views on modern Japanese history that they thought did not circulate in the mainstream media networks. In other words, the popularity of the forum seemed to be maintained by individuals who had the desire to be nationalist subjects, who then became cyber right-wingers.

However, according to Kitada Akihiro, around the early 2000s, at the latest, the forum did not actually operate as a place where each individual tried to confirm their subjectivity, but rather as one to dislocate the subjectivity that was forced on individuals. Kitada (2005, p. 196) argued that Ni-channeru (in the early 2000s) was a phenomenon unique to the post-1980s period, because it inherited the ironist and cynic attitude that had been invented in the 1980s media culture to criticize and relativize the excessive subjectivism that had reached its peak during the radical leftist movements of the 1970s.

Taking the ironist attitude, an individual would be able to understand the kind of meta principles, such as ideal, ideology, belief, grand narrative, and so forth, that defined the values or meanings of the beings of the world. Kitada was convinced that a repetition of the ironist and cynic strategy was seen in the forum, Ni-channeru. Even if the users of the forum criticized the leftist or liberalist views of modern Japanese history and favored the revisionist views that the rightist camps were likely to argue, it would not be because they were nationalist subjects, but because they thought that the meta principles that were upheld by the leftist and liberalist camps were dominant, and wanted to make the principles an object of “ridicule,” cynically. This was a major incentive for the users; however, there was a more important incentive for them: According to Kitada (2005, p. 206), the users’ crucial incentive for participating in the forum was the continuation of communication. In other words, their main purpose was to enjoy the continuation of the communication itself. Kitada (2005) called this communication for communication the “consummatory communication” (p. 206). For the users, the ironist and cynic attitude was the dominant mode of communication in the forum, which they felt was necessary for their communications to continue more smoothly and comfortably.

Nevertheless, even if the users of the Ni-channeru forum did not take the revisionist views and nationalism seriously, the discourse that was constructed and amplified in the forum seemed to obviously correlate with Japan’s social situation in the new millennium. In the 2000s, due to the complex relationship with South Korea, anti-Korean sentiment seemed to rise.

On the one hand, there seemed to be several tendencies to improve the relationship and communication between Japan and South Korea. In 2002, the FIFA World Cup was co-hosted by Japan and South Korea; this occasion was thought to encourage the wide-ranging exchange between the people of the two countries. Furthermore, as the film, Shri, successfully captured the box office in 2000, and the television drama series, Winter Sonata, subsequently succeeded to gain phenomenal popularity in 2003 and 2004, the Korean Wave began to rise in Japan in the early 2000s. Indeed, the Korean Wave has kept developing new kinds of appreciation of Korean culture and society and expanding human exchange between the two countries. Thus, it has significantly contributed to the improvement of the image of South Korea (see Iwabuchi, 2008).

However, simultaneously, there were crucial moments that engendered anti-Korean sentiments among Japanese people. During the 2002 FIFA World Cup, some people in Japan were angered when people in South Korea were displeased with Japan’s win and happy with its defeat in the top 16. When the prime mister, Koizumi Jun’ichirō (2001–2006), began to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in 2001, it brought strong criticisms from South Korea and China; however, some people in Japan, who were not happy with such criticisms, developed nationalist sentiments and targeted the rise of the Korean Wave. In 2005, the book, Manga Ken-kanryū (The comic of hating the Korean Wave), written by Yamano Sharin, was published. Since this publication, subsequent volumes of the book have been sold, and the total number of copies of the publication is said to have reached more than one million. Whereas the book title suggests a critique of the Korean Wave in Japan, the main content was to criticize or negate the outrageous claims or actions in Korea over Japanese colonialism. Furthermore, the book replaced its allegations against Korea with an attack on resident Koreans (zainichi-Korean) who were born and brought up in Japan—decedents of Koreans who migrated during Japanese colonial rule. The book depicted resident Koreans as irrational and ignorant people who strongly criticized the history of Japanese colonialism from their “distorted” perspective but were finally refuted by smart, young, Japanese people. In addition, the book wrongly argued that the resident Koreans were receiving special welfare privilege that was not provided for ordinary Japanese.

Thus, the book served to connect those who were anti-Korea, anti-resident Koreans, and anti-Korean Wave, and had a heavy impact on the rise of cyber right-wingers and the hate speech movement in the 2000s and 2010s. Indeed, in August 2011, incited by the postings in the Ni-channeru forum about a male actor who had negatively tweeted about the inflow of Korean media culture to Japanese television programs, many people gathered to demonstrate against Fuji television, which they regarded as a major commercial television station that promoted the Korean Wave in Japan. Whereas this demonstration was not led by Zaitokukai, a group that was notorious for being the main organizer of the hate speech movements, it has been understood to be a phenomenon that was caused by the rise of anti-Korean sentiments.

The rise of the hate speech movement and the right-wing populist regime: populist swing to the right?

Around the mid-2000s, the word, netto uyoku or neto-uyo (cyber right-wingers), came to be widely known. According to Tsuji (2008), the netto uyoku can be defined as follows: they are (1) anti-South Korea and anti-China; (2) they support politicians who honor the Yasukuni Shrine, a revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and patriotism education in Japanese schools; and (3) they actively participate in online discussion on political and social issues. Most of them are males who actively participate in the postings and discussions in the Ni-channeru forum, which are widely disseminated through various curation sites (matome saito). They are highly skeptical of leftist-biased mass media and intellectuals, whose discourse, they believe, dominates the consciousness of Japanese people. This skepticism resonates with the nationalist views on modern Japan from the perspective of historical revisionism, and their criticisms on mass media and intellectuals. However, compared to nationalists, such as Kobayashi or the revisionist textbook group, the anonymous comments posted by cyber right-wingers in the forum tend to be more offensive, rude, irrational, and affective, while their anti-mass media inclination is heightened by their anti-Korea and anti-China sentiments. Against this backdrop, the rise of the so-called “Activist Conservatives” (Kōdō suru hoshu) such as Zainichi tokkenn wo yurusanai shimin-no-kai (Citizen’s League against Special Privilege of Koreans in Japan), or Zaitokukai, was made possible.

Zaitokukai started its activities in January 2007 and has attracted attention because of its blatantly discriminatory, offensive, racist, and jingoistic arguments and demonstrations. Although the cyber right-wingers’ activities were initially limited to cyberspace, Zaitokukai has been regarded as the mobilization of the cyber right-wingers into the real world. In other words, the use of digital media networks has virtually connected individuals with similar tendencies and has eventually spawned their participation in actual collective actions or movements on the streets. Here, it is important to note that the revisionist discourse, which has a strong influence on the cyber right-wingers and the hate speech movement, was constructed and sustained by communicative processes. For example, Kobayashi decided his political directions through communication with his comic’s audiences via letters, while a representative right-wing magazine, Seiron (The right opinion), which supported the revisionist textbook group, devoted one-tenths of the total pages to the opinions of the audiences (Kurahashi, 2019, pp. 110–111). Thus, through an attitude of relying not on elites’ or authorities’ views but on ordinary people’s opinions, such as Kobayashi’s comic audiences, the revisionist camps adopted a strategy to convert the majority into truthfulness. For the revisionist camp, the number of audiences who support a particular idea should be considered as a parameter for measuring the idea’s truthfulness. A discourse that is constructed through communication among many audiences will be a profitable product that can appeal to more audiences. In this sense, the revisionist camps have equated the truthfulness (or use value) of discourse with its exchange value. As digitalized communication technology has promoted the transformation of individuals from passive consumers or receivers to active producers or senders, the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movement emerged as a result of the technological amplification of the communication process in the revisionist camps.

The main target of their demonstrations is, as the name clearly suggests, the resident Koreans who they mistakenly allege to be receiving privileged benefits and welfare from the Japanese government. The demonstrations against the resident Koreans, which are organized by Zaitokukai, have appeared in various parts of Japan, such as a Korean elementary school in Kyoto, Shin-Okubo, a famous, large Korean town in Tokyo, and so forth; they shout or show highly offensive messages, such as “Good or Bad Koreans: Kill Them All” (e.g., Ishibashi, 2013). In addition, they target the institutions, organizations, or individuals that they label as anti-Japan and pro-Korea or pro-China, such as Ainu, Okinawan, handicapped people, sexual minorities, atomic-bomb survivors, organizations that advocate for the abandonment of nuclear power, and so forth. Zaitokukai believes that because the aim of these left or liberal-inclined camps is to exploit the Japanese nation for their own profit, they are the same as the resident Koreans who intend to cheat against and weaken Japan. Upholding such distorted or delusional ideas, the people who support the hate speech movement are always mindful of their enemies.

The rise of the cyber right-winger in the virtual world and that of the hate speech movement in the real world have been discussed as phenomena that are related to the problem of the whole of Japanese society swinging to the right. This problem has also been associated with the long-term regime by the prime minister, Abe Shinzo (2012–2020), who succeeded in maintaining high popularity. In December 2012, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) succeeded in seizing political power from the Democratic Party of Japan, and Abe, as president of the LDP, organized a conservative government. As Abe was known for his conservative and nationalist political stance, he adopted a stronger attitude toward the territorial dispute over Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands with China and Dokdo/Takeshima with South Korea, as well as toward the historical dispute over the colonialism and invasions by the Japanese Empire. The territorial dispute had already heated up and caused massive anti-Japan demonstrations in China and South Korea. Another reason for the rise of the anti-China and anti-Korean sentiment in this period was that Japan’s economic and cultural superiority was threatened. On the one hand, Japan had experienced a long recession and a low economic growth rate since the early 1990s, while the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 had devastated the socioeconomic situation. On the other hand, China had enjoyed high economic growth and had come to be regarded as a rising economic, political, and military power, while South Korea had established itself as a cultural power whose products had become popular not only regionally, that is, in east Asia, but also globally.

Thus, due to both internal and external reasons, Japan had lost its special status as the only state that had achieved modernization in east Asia; because many people in Japan were unhappy or irritated, it might have fueled a nationalistic and anti-China and anti-Korea sentiment among them. Indeed, public opinion polls in 2012 indicated that anti-China and anti-Korea sentiments among the Japanese people had grown sharply, and since the mid-2010s, mass media had marketed nationalistic sentiments on television programs praising the greatness of Japan (nihon-raisan or nihon-sugoi-kei bangumi), and anti-China and anti-Korea sentiments in numerous “hate-books” (heitobon) against Korea, resident Koreans, and China. Thus, it is thought that the government’s strong approach to China and South Korea enabled Abe to gain high popularity among Japanese people in a populist way that seemingly turned nationalistic.

Besides the cyber right-wingers and Zaitokukai, there was a different nationalist organization that attracted attention during the Abe government: Nippon kaigi (The Japan conference). This organization was established in 1997 through a merger of two conservative political organizations: Nihon wo mamoru-kai (The Association for Protecting Japan), which was established in 1973 by Shintoist and Buddhist religious leaders, and Nihon wo mamoru kokumin-kaigi (The National Conference for Protecting Japan), which was established in 1981 by intellectuals, Shintoist and Buddhist religious leaders, and businessmen, and whose aim was to revise the postwar constitution. The main purpose of the organization was to recover the “beautiful” national traditions of Japan that had been devastated by the postwar “democratic” and “individualistic” constitution; the organization argued the necessity for creating a new constitution that respected the sacred and traditional “National Polity” (kokutai) that was guaranteed under the Meiji constitution bestowed by the emperor (M. Yamazaki, 2016, pp. 97–135). The organization is thought to have had a crucial influence on the LDP’s policies, while Abe and other principal members of his cabinet (including the current, i.e., March 2021 prime minister, Suga Yoshihide) supported its activities. The organization also had the capacity to mobilize people at grassroots level; for example, it succeeded in gathering more than ten thousand people for an assembly in 2015, to appeal the revision of the constitution (Sugano, 2016, pp. 100–163). As some commentators point out (Furuya, 2013; Taka, 2015; N. Yamazaki, 2015), Zatiokukai and the cyber right-wingers were less concerned with the national narrative that worked to define the symbol for national integration. In this sense, the Nippon kaigi organization, which was enthusiastic about glorifying the emperor as the ethnic symbol of the Japanese nation, was different from Zatiokukai and the cyber right-wingers: the former was a much more classical and reactionary organization of nationalists. However, the organization was more likely to be associated with Zatiokukai and the cyber right-wingers, and both were often discussed as phenomena that were generated by a social swing to the right (Tsukada, 2017), which enabled the high popularity of the Abe government. Several books aimed at criticizing the Nippon Kaigi organization were published in the mid-2010s (Sugano, 2016; M. Yamazaki, 2016); they seemed to share the same sense of the crisis that the Japanese political situation was on the verge of returning to the one before the defeat in the Asia Pacific War. It was widely assumed that, while the “populist” government organized by Abe intended to recover the reactionary and nationalist political principles by completely abandoning the postwar legacies, the Japanese populace, including the cyber right-wingers and Zaitokukai, supported such moves.

However, according to recent studies, it has been revealed that Japanese society has not swung to the right at all. Tanabe (2019) argues that, although the consciousness of Japanese as a homogeneous race and the anti-China and anti-Korea sentiment have grown, the patriotism and feeling of national pride has declined slightly (pp. 247–248). He adds that there is also a public sentiment that favors the abandonment of nuclear power, which has been regarded as a pro-left or pro-liberal sentiment (Tanabe, 2019, p. 248). Overall, he points out, not even are there political polarizations, the rise of which has become a major social problem in the Anglo-European world: the clash between pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps in the United States, the conflict between pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit groupings in the United Kingdom, or the rise of far-right racist camps in many European countries (Tanabe, 2019, pp. 253–256). Instead, the political majority of Japan comprises people who prefer equivocal choices to decisive ones on any controversial political issues, such as whether Japan should maintain the United States–Japan security treaty, or whether US military bases should be withdrawn from Okinawa. Although it has been strongly argued that the popularity of the Abe government was sustained by populism, there seems to be no adequate evidence to support such arguments, because, as Sugita says, populism drives political polarizations strongly, or at least engenders a dominant political tendency more obviously. On the contrary, there seems to be no dominant or strong political tendency among the Japanese people, which means that they lack strong ground to become any subjects, including nationalist subjects. Even if more Japanese come to think of the Japanese as a homogeneous race and have the anti-China and anti-Korea sentiment, such thinking and sentiments do not directly nurture nationalism.

The rise of the cyber right-wingers and Zaitokukai occurred against the above socio-political backdrops. This indicates that they do not pursue the recovery of the narrative of the nation, as the Nippon kaigi organization does, and that their pseudo-nationalist claims and activities lack the national narrative and symbols that define and form the nationalist subject. Indeed, neither are they nationalist subjects, nor did they desire such subjects. As Kitada contended, the cyber right-wingers cannot take the nationalist narrative seriously, and are therefore more likely to become jingoistic and racist. Of course, the Nippon kaigi organization has its own problem relating to jingoism and racism; however, this problem is different from that of the cyber right-wingers and Zaitokukai. Thus, it would be impossible to understand and criticize the rise of the cyber right-wingers and Zaitokukai from the perspective of the critique of nationalism or national subject that was argued in the 1990s. To critique them, we must adopt a different approach.

The affect and digital media: the condition of the rise of the neo-nationalist subject

According to N. Yamazaki (2015, p. 297), there seems to be a rise of “strange” nationalisms (kimyō-na nasyonarizumu) in cyberspace and on the streets. Needless to say, the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements are mentioned here. N. Yamazaki (2015) argues that the “strange” nationalism seen in the movements is different from the traditional or classical, normal nationalism because, whereas the strange nationalism emphasizes the threat of “them” as the external enemy that endangers the internal community of “us,” it shows little concern for the pursuit of concrete ways of integrating the nation (p. 14): the strange nationalists are not interested in how to, whether culturally or institutionally, guarantee or define the homogeneous “us” as a substance. From these analyses, it can be argued that the strange nationalists of the cyber right-wingers and the participants in the hate speech movements are not nationalist subjects, because they lack the symbol or symbolic order according to which their subjectivities are formed and defined. Their indifference to the cultural principle guaranteeing the nation’s homogeneity implies that they do not respect the national narrative that defines the symbolic order, which has been regarded as the most significant rationale for the traditional nationalists. The lack of the national narrative and symbolic order makes it difficult for the strange nationalists to have a totalized perspective and to behave, speak, and think coherently. As points out Sakai(2015, p. 8), to form a nationalist subject, the process of individualization (kojin-ka) has to be completed, because the subject must be the exclusive and coherent “in-dividual” whose “in-dividability” is underpinned by a consistent principle. The national narrative and the symbolic order it defines work as consistent principles; however, the strange nationalists lose such principles. In this sense, although N. Yamazaki (2015, p. 285) argues that the strange nationalism is a variant of identity politics, this analysis would not be correct in the strict sense. This is because the strange nationalist of the cyber right-wingers and the participants in the hate speech movements do not have any consistent principle on which the identity of their subjectivity can be grounded.

As seen in the last section, the lack of the national narrative and symbolic order is a common phenomenon in Japan. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that is facilitated by the development of digital media communication. Dean proposes the concept of communicative capitalism to critically analyze this problem. Hers is “. . . the position that contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” (Dean, 2010, pp. 3–4). Here, Dean uses the word “enjoyment” in a Freud-Lacanian sense: jouissance. As Dean argues (2010, p. 40), in “Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire and drive each designate a way that the subject relates to enjoyment,” and, whereas desire is a “. . . desire for a jouissance that can never be attained,” “. . . drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process of not reaching it.” Enjoyment/jouissance is the lost status in which every individual supposes they should have been fully satisfied. Desire is the rationale that makes an individual pursue such a complete satisfaction as the recognition of their full identity. To attain the enjoyment, the individual begins to think of the kinds of identity they want to have and to be recognized as by others. Meanwhile, the individual understands that there are symbols, narratives, or values that define the social relationship between I and others, and, locating their identity in the symbolic order, the individual becomes the subject to take their position in the order. Nevertheless, the subject can never attain the enjoyment through desire because, produced by the symbolic order itself that calls an individual to have an identity or to form a subjectivity, desire itself does not belong to the subject originally. However, in the contemporary socio-political conditions that weaken dominant symbols, narratives, or values, it becomes difficult for individuals to have and nurture such a desire; instead, drive comes to catch individuals more strongly. The individual caught by drive is driven by affect that works at the subconscious level, which the subject usually puts under the control of their consciousness. The individual caught by drive can no longer pursue their satisfaction through a consistent and dominant order, but is subject to the subconscious affect, and temporary and unstable affective satisfactions are given to them. Thus, the enjoyment attained by drive is affective, and digital media communication is, as Dean points out (2010, pp. 95–96), more likely to construct “affective networks,” which the current neoliberal capitalism has exploited.

As Dean argues, there is “. . . the decline of symbolic efficiency” both in real and in cyberspaces. Digital media communication is subject to “. . . the fundamental uncertainty accompanying the impossibility of totalization,” and the “. . . contemporary setting of electronically mediated subjectivity is one of infinite doubt, ultimate reflexivization” (Dean, 2010, p. 6). For every individual mediated by digital communication, the “. . . very condition[s] of possibility for adequation have been foreclosed. It’s just your opinion” (Dean, 2010, p. 6). In other words, “. . . there is no longer a Master signifier stabilizing meaning, knitting together the chain of signifiers and hindering its tendencies to float off into indeterminacy,” and such an absence of the Master signifier “. . . suggest[s] a new setting of complete openness and freedom—no authority tells the subject what to do, what to desire, how to structure its choices” (Dean, 2010, pp. 6–7). Under such a situation, every individual becomes more likely to be subject to something that elicits their affect, and a digital media platform implements the algorism that is aimed at calculating the kind of information or data that can elicit the affects from more individuals. As Srnicek (2017) argues, the “. . . platform has emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data” (p. 6), because, thanks to the platform,

. . . [m]assive new expanses of potential data were opened up, and new industries arose to extract these data and to use them so as to optimise [the] production process, give insight into consumer preference, control workers, [and] provide the foundation for new products and services. (Srnicek, 2017, pp. 40–41)

The affective networks are constructed through the platform extracting and utilizing potential data that will elicit more affect, and every individual becomes easily influenced and controlled in the networks. Thus, as Andrejevic (2013) argues, “. . . [f]orms of ideological manipulation give way to the modulation of affect” (p. 53). Consequently, digital media communication engenders both excessive indifference and excessive reaction. While the users of digital media technology have lost the ground to care for the meanings or intentions of what others say, they cannot avoid reacting to the information or data that evoke their affects strongly. “Despite the fact that bloggers generally decry the degeneration of discussion into ad hominem attacks and flame wars—nearly always the result of a misunderstanding rather than a disagreement—we secretly enjoy them” (Dean, 2010, p. 5).

From this standpoint, it can be argued that the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements have emerged through the modulation of affect by digital media platforms. However, how are affects elicited from the cyber right-wingers and the participants in the hate speech movements? According to Matsumoto (2018, pp. 243–237), the mechanism of “the theft of enjoyment” plays a key role here. To put it more concretely, if an individual finds someone, B, who seems to get better satisfaction than them, they come to have the fantasy that B must steal their satisfaction and, eventually, they have strong affect against B. In tandem with Matsumoto and Dean, it could be argued that the cyber right-wingers and participants in hate speech movements regarded themselves as “. . . beings threatened by the presence and enjoyment of others, preoccupied with the worry that [the] others’ live[s] are more meaningful and fun than their own” (Dean, 2010, p. 92). For the cyber right-wingers and participants in hate speech movements, the resident Koreans are the people who enjoy the status stolen from Japanese—the privileged benefits and welfare from the Japanese government—and therefore, they are the object of exclusion; or the Korean Wave enjoys popularity that was stolen from the Japanese media culture, and thus should be accused and attacked. In digital media networks, the users who feel unable to enjoy can have the fantasy of who stole their enjoyment through the communications mediated by platforms such as Ni-channeru, and the communications that enable the users to have the fantasy construct the affective networks that attract more users who feel unable to enjoy. The jingoism and racism by the cyber right-wingers and participants in hate speech movements are driven by the affect that is elicited by the “theft of enjoyment,” and this affect is circulated and amplified through digital media communications. The crucial point is that the “theft of enjoyment” is also enjoyment. As Dean (2010) argues, in tandem with Slavoj Žižek (p. 92), “. . . enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen.’” The cyber right-wingers and participants in hate speech movements attain enjoyment or satisfaction by claiming that they cannot attain enjoyment due to the “theft of enjoyment.” Therefore, this process is infinitive, repetitive, and one in which enjoyment is never reached.

According to Higuchi (2014, pp. 97–99), the construction of dissatisfaction by individuals through digital media communications motivates them to approach the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements. As Higuchi (2014) points out, for many of the participants of the hate speech movements, their first encounter with the activities of Zaitokukai occurred by chance via videos that were uploaded on digital media platforms; they then came to find the “special privilege of Koreans in Japan” as the problem (p. 105). This empirical survey indicates the possibility that the individuals who have the feeling that there is something unsatisfied are more likely to be influenced by the “theft of enjoyment.”

Because the cyber right-wingers and participants in the hate speech movements are not underpinned by the national narrative or symbolic order, but are driven by affect, they do not form modern national subjects in the traditional or classical sense. They form subjects without the subjectivity that is located in the totalized symbolic order; the emergence of this kind of neo-nationalist subject has become conspicuous in recent years. As Andrejevic (2013) argues, “. . . [i]n the era of the reflexive critique of grand narrative (and the forms of representation they underwrite), Fox relies on the mobilization of intensities that congeal in various contexts into fear, anger, indignation, patriotism, pride, and so on” (p. 60). The neo-nationalist subjectivation through the modulation of affect in the absence of the grand narrative or symbolic order becomes a common phenomenon globally. The political polarizations and the rise of populism in Anglo-European countries are also not so much supported by ideologically mobilized subjects as by individuals who are driven by affects. In Japan, the neo-nationalist subjects are particularly formed through the affective networks of digital media networks, and are therefore fragmented, self-concerned, inconsistent, and of course, affective.

Conclusion

Given the socio-political conditions in contemporary Japan, the neo-nationalist subject has two serious implications. The first implication is that the neo-nationalist subject can easily be intersected with the traditional modern nationalist. The jingoism or feeling of superiority to other nations argued by the nationalist subjects can be amplified by the racist or jingoist insult affectively raised by the neo-nationalist subjects. Indeed, such intersections were seen more obviously in the early stage of the development of the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements, particularly in the relationship between Kobayashi and the revisionist textbook group and the cyber right-wingers.

The second implication, which is more crucial, is that there is potential that the so-called “ordinary Japanese” may become neo-nationalists in Japan. In the politico-economic situation that the principle of neoliberal capitalism penetrates, our enjoyments are always satisfied by products. Through the affective networks underpinned by digital media platforms, every individual is controlled to react, embrace, and enjoy the product that elicits their affect. As points out Gilbert (2014, p. 148), “. . . contemporary marketing relies on the general circulation of affects of excitement (‘buzz,’ for example) and attention, and on the active cultivation of mimetic, suggestive relations (‘viral’ marketing).” However, once the individual becomes unable to enjoy the affective products, they begin to seek someone who steals their enjoyment. Then, when they find the thief of their enjoyment through digital media communication, their affect is elicited, and they become the neo-nationalist subjects, or the cyber right-wingers.

This is the mechanism of the rise of neo-nationalist subjects, or the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements. Therefore, even if there is no evidence that proves the political polarizations, or the dominant political rightward tendency, it does not mean the rise of neo-nationalism or of the cyber right-wingers and hate speech movements is limited. Rather, when more people become unable to enjoy affective products due to a deterioration of the politico-economic conditions in Japan, neo-nationalism that appeals to jingoism and racism may succeed to seize dominancy. In his book on Zaitokukai, Yasuda (2012) mentions the episode in which, in his interview with resident Koreans, there was a person who expressed a fear of ordinary Japanese (p. 363). The person felt “. . . it is really scary when considering millions of Japanese people are invisibly supporting the Zaitokukai.” The real problem of neo-nationalist subjects in Japan is that such an expression of fear can have high validity.